Friday Night

First off, many of my NESCBWI colleagues who did go to Springfield posted pictures on Facebook of the fun time they had going out to eat with friends. As luck would have it, I went out with friends Friday night. We had fun.

Saturday

I worked three-plus hours mid-day Saturday and some more late in the day. I outlined/blue printed/underpainted three different chapters. For one of them, this involved a major fix. I also did some research for this project. In terms of time, this was the equivalent of attending three workshops.

Then I went outside to do some yard work.

I'm not mentioning this because I'm one of those bloggers who thinks everyone is interested in every minor moment of her life, in spite of that restaurant picture above. No, I'm mentioning this because of what happened while I spent an hour raking this bank. What happened is that I realized I needed another chapter for the book I'd worked on that morning.

I was rushing the ending

There were lots of chapters in the first half of the book, making the second half seem skimpy.

This new chapter would be about yard work. Seriously, it should work.

That new chapter came about because while cleaning up the day lilies and the fern bank, I had a breakout experience, something I haven't written about here for a while. In short, what happens with a breakout experience is you spend some time working with a problem, then do something mindless, like raking. While your brain relaxes because nothing is required of it, it continues working on some level on what it was working on before. And...BOOM...a breakout experience.

Sunday

We had plans to attend an organized walk Sunday afternoon. Walking, I thought. That's like raking while covering a lot more ground. So I made a point of working Sunday morning, underpainting that new chapter I'd come up with Saturday afternoon, for one thing. Work in the morning, I'd have a breakout experience in the afternoon, right?

Well, no. Not a thing. Not a single thought came Sunday afternoon. Except for the one about doing a blog post on why this happened. Stay tuned.

Sometime over this weekend I also knocked off a 800-word satirical essay about my experience without the Internet last week. It's unlikely I'll be able to publish it, but it was a good experience getting something done that fast.

About Me

I'm the author of eight books for children and young adults, all published by G.P. Putnam's Sons. I've republished Saving the Planet & Stuff as an eBook. Now I have experience wading in both the traditional and self-publishing pools. My essays have been published at The Millions and Literary Mama, and my short stories at Alimentum and Cricket. I have been blogging at Original Content for eleven years.